Outage notices
The value of a recorded outage notice is not the recording. It is being able to replace it forty minutes later when the situation has changed.
What goes wrong
Most outage messages are stale because updating them means booking a voice artist, or because the person who knows the current status cannot operate the phone system. So the line keeps playing a message written at the start of the incident, and the call volume it was meant to absorb arrives anyway.
A generated message removes the bottleneck: the person running the incident writes a sentence, and the line is updated before the next status meeting.
Scripts you can use
Written to be read aloud by a machine, not by a person. The note under each one says which part a general-purpose voice model gets wrong.
Initial notice
We are aware of a fault affecting card payments and our engineers are working on it. This message was last updated at 9:40 this morning. We will update it again within the hour.
Timestamp every version. A notice without a time is indistinguishable from a notice nobody has touched since Tuesday.
Update with a workaround
Card payments are still affected. Orders can be placed and paid for on our website as normal. This message was last updated at 11:15.
The workaround is the only part of the message that changes what the caller does next. Put it before the apology, not after.
Resolved
The fault affecting card payments was resolved at 2:05 this afternoon. If you are still having trouble, press 1 to speak to someone.
Do not simply delete the notice when it is fixed. Callers who tried during the outage need to hear that it is over.
Before you record it
- Every version carries the time it was recorded.
- The next update time is promised, and then met.
- The workaround comes before the apology.
- A resolved notice runs for at least a few hours before the line returns to normal.
Questions
How often should an outage message be updated?
At the interval you promised in the previous version, even when there is nothing new. "Still investigating, updated at 11:15" is information; silence against a promised update is not.
Why put a timestamp in a recorded outage message?
Because the caller cannot tell a fresh recording from a forgotten one. The timestamp is what makes the message credible, and it is the reason a generated recording beats a professionally voiced one during an incident — you can afford to re-cut it.
Generate these with IVR Voice Gen
IVR Voice Gen is text-to-speech built for phone systems: digit strings, references, dates and addresses are read the way a caller can write them down, in English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. It is in early access.